Front end Tech Lead

You will be joining a small, all remote (4 person) engineering team, spread across Europe (UK, GR, CY, PL) with the opportunity to shape and lead all things front-end. Primarily you will be working on our website, Chrome extension (in Google's own top 12 extensions of 2021!), and nascent embed and SDK strategy.

## About mote

Mote is a two year-old, Silicon Valley VC-backed, web audio recorder company. Our initial market focus has been in education (K12 and Higher Education), where our extension saw dramatic worldwide adoption during the pandemic. We are increasingly exploring entering the enterprise marketplace, as a tool for teams to leave messages and give feedback.

## About you

* Amazing player-coach: an exemplary contributor of maintainable, clean, correct, performant, elegant code, but cares even more about making the team around them smarter, faster, happier. * Not your first rodeo: You have been around the block enough times to have acquired a playbook of how to build high performing software teams (especially on the front-end), having strongly held evidence-based opinions on the practises and technologies which add or subtract from that. * Missionary not mercenary: You have checked out mote website, and are intrigued by its potential. You want to stick around a few years to see where it can go.

## The stack you will be working on

The current front-end stack is built with ReactJS, JavaScript, styled components, and a fairly usual suspect modern toolchain of Webpack, Jest, Cypress, Playwright, yarn workspaces, Storybook, Github, CircleCI, CloudFront, Sentry and Datadog. We are open-minded though currently underinvested in other languages which compile to JS (eg TypeScript, Elm, CoffeeScript etc).

The back-end is built with Python, Flask, Redis, Dynamo, ECS, S3 and sprinklings of Azure and GCP. A desire to contribute to back-end API implementation is welcomed if full stack feature ownership is strongly desired as a preferred way of working, but is very far from an essential requirement.

While our back-end has heavy test automation investment, we have made substantially less proportional investment on the front-end. The right person will want to lead the charge on paying back tech debt in this area.

## Mote culture

Mote is a remote-only startup, comprising a small team distributed across many time zones and locations. We’re genuinely mission-driven and we find our work exciting and rewarding. There’s never a shortage of work to do, but we value maintaining work-life balance.
To excel in this role at Mote, you’re the kind of person who can prioritise effectively, and then stay in ‘heads down’ mode to get the job done.
As a member of a remote team, you’ll be happy working independently, but you’ll know how to work collaboratively using asynchronous tools like Mote, Loom and Slack. As a general rule, we try to minimise time spent in scheduled meetings, preferring to ‘jump on a zoom’ to work through a difficult problem when necessary.
As a ‘Motey’, you’ll be expected to challenge colleagues - to push back firmly and politely when you disagree, but you try your best to bring the team along with you by explaining your thinking.

## Requirements

You are already a senior front-end engineer or tech lead, with at least 5 years experience at fast-growth consumer and/or SaaS tech companies.
You have had enough experience of leading or influencing teams as a senior, that you feel you want to take the next step and own more ownership and responsibility in the success of a front-end team.
Demonstrable command of working with production JavaScript/TypeScript codebases
You either have formal degree-level training in Computer Science or can demonstrate solid evidence of self-taught solid grasp of fundamentals.
You have demonstrated you are a high impact individual contributor combining high levels of accuracy, rigour and output.
You have excellent judgement on engineering trade-offs, with a fine-tuned sense of when to pick between accruing more tech debt, leaving as is but increasing tests, refactoring or wholesale rewriting.
You have previously championed and lead meaningful investments in test automation (using Jest, Playwright, Cypress etc) and nuanced opinions on test pyramids, ice cream cones and honeycombs.
You live by the “no asshole” rule, demonstrating high levels of empathy for peers, non-technical colleagues and users.

We have a cut-down version of our web offering in the iOS App Store (built with React Native). This may become an area of increased investment. Experience of React Native is desirable but not essential.

## Benefits

Competitive salary
Stock option plan
Leave package
Work from home
Flexible hours
Working with an amazing team

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Salary and compensation

$80,000 — $110,000/year

Location

🇪🇺 EU